In the Garden of the Fugitives

In the Garden of the Fugitives

Almost twenty years after forbidding him to contact her, Vita receives an email from Royce. Once, he was her benefactor and she was one of his brightest proteges. Now Royce is ailing and Vita's career has stalled, and both have a need to settle accounts. Beyond their shared, murky history, both have lost beloveds, one to a strange disappearance, another to an untimely death. And both are trying to free themselves from deeper pasts - Vita from the inheritance of her birthplace, Royce from the grip of the ancient city of Pompeii, and the secrets of the Garden of the Fugitives.

Between what's been repressed and what has been excavated are disturbances that reach backthrough decades, even centuries. Profoundly addictive and unsettling, In the Garden of the Fugitives is a masterpiece of duplicity and counterplay, as brilliantly illuminating as it is surprising - about the obscure workings of guilt in the human psyche, the compulsion to create and control, and the dangerous morphing of desire into obsession. It is the breakthrough work of one of Australia's most exciting emerging writers.

Author description

Ceridwen Dovey was born in South Africa and raised between South Africa and Australia. She studied social anthropology at Harvard as an undergraduate and received her Masters in social anthropology from New York University. Her debut novel, Blood Kin, was published in fifteen countries, shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, and selected for the US National Book Foundation's prestigious '5 Under 35' honours list. The Wall Street Journal has named her as one of their 'artists to watch.' Her second book of fiction, Only the Animals, was described by The Guardian as a 'dazzling, imagined history of humans' relationship with animals.' Ceridwen lives in Sydney.